As the forum notified me after typing this up for the first time, the original Fallout 3 thread is to old to bump, so here goes....for the second time.

I had been playing Skyrim again lately, because I never finished any of the major storylines. As with the other Bethesda games played via the 360 the loading times can get tiresome, and have a tendency to break the flow of the game. Load game, load character, load fast travel, load building, repeat. New Vegas certainly took the cake with its memory leak issue.

At the same time, I started thinking about the past generation of games and what game I would call my favorite. Predictably, Fallout 3 was always at the top of that stew. Then as I was staring at the umpteenth Skyrim loading screen I had an epiphany. Fallout 3 runs pretty well on my iMac, and my iMac also has a nice new SSD beating at its core. Screw it... I deleted everything related to DayZ on my XP partition (which only has 20GB to work with) and pirated the hell out of Fallout 3.....don't give me that look, I bought the game on Xbox and every piece of DLC, over a hundred dollars worth. The content is mine, I paid for it, go to hell.

First off the game looks amazing, despite having to tone down the draw distance a bit. Runs between 30-50 FPS with textures on high. I dunno if it's the settings or just the higher pixel density on the screen, but I'm seeing this game through a fresh set of eyes right now. Secondly, the SSD makes a mockery out of my preconceptions about loading times. Booting the game up and loading my character takes 10 seconds, and most of that is due to the menu not being quick enough. Fast travel across the map takes 2 seconds, at most. Loading interiors, less than 1 second, sometimes instantaneous.

I present to you (mostly Bogues) my look back at my favorite game of the last gen, and one of my all times favorites, as shown through screenshots. I gifted myself a Rifle with 100 rounds, Recon armor only available through the console, and 100 skill points in guns and speech. This was just to offset the tedium of starting a fresh character, everything else will be legit. I'll add little quips to, hopefully, keep it interesting.